ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

History Museums: Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico

By Robert Wilks

Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico. Via Wikipedia.

My favorite history museum, and one of my favorite museums of any type, is the Museo Nacionál de Antropología in Mexico City. It is housed in an enormous structure filled with the pre-Columbian culture of Mexico. It covers every civilization, period and style in its artifacts. They are beautifully displayed, perfectly lit and present a dazzling array of forms and colors. There is so much to see, multiple visits are required. I was totally amazed at the richness and variety of cultures. I highly recommend it.

Monolith of the Stone of the Sun, also named Aztec calendar stone.

Conflict in the Confederacy: William Williston Heartsill’s diary

By Josh Urich

William Williston Heartsill volunteered to fight for the South before the Civil War even began. For the first two years of his service, he and his comrades from Harrison County, Texas served as a cavalryman on Texas’s western frontier. His unit, the W.P. Lane Rangers, finally saw combat at the Battle of Arkansas Post on January 11, 1863. They were captured on the second day of combat. Heartsill spent several months in Camp Douglas in Illinois and then was exchanged for Union prisoners.

Print of the bombardment and capture of Fort Hindman, Arkansas Post, January 11th 1863. Via Wikipedia. — Bombardment and capture of Fort Hindman, Arkansas Post, January 11th 1863. Via Wikipedia.

Upon their release, the Lane Rangers were separated and Heartsill was mustered into General Braxton Bragg’s infantry. Heartsill resented serving as a conscripted infantryman and longed to rejoin the rest of his volunteer unit on horseback. After the battle Chickamauga, and mere days before the battle of Chattanooga, Heartsill and one of his fellow Rangers abandoned Bragg’s army and headed back to Texas to rejoin the W.P. Lane Rangers. They succeeded after a month of dangerous travel.

Print of the Battle of Chickamauga. Via Wikipedia. — Battle of Chickamauga. Via Wikipedia.

The Lane Rangers saw little combat before they were dissolved in mid-1865. Five years after the war concluded, Heartsill printed one thousand copies of his wartime diary––although not before editing it to defend his desertion and his company’s honor. Shortly after his diary was published, he was elected mayor of Marshall, Texas, Harrison’s county seat. In the ensuing decades, Heartsill was active in the leadership of the Marshall camp of the United Confederate Veterans and was involved in both regional politics and business.

The section of the diary below is taken from the June 1, 1864 entry of Heartsill’s diary. At this point in the war, Heartsill had already abandoned Bragg’s army and rejoined the Rangers in the same place they started, Harrison County, Texas. After a number of weeks back in Harrison, Heartsill and the men began to hear “denouncements” against them. There were several reasons the townspeople turned against the Rangers. During their service, they had lost about ten percent of their company. By contrast, other units from Harrison County lost an average of fifty percent each. Many people in the county lost children or siblings from these other units. It was natural for townspeople who had lost loved ones to feel resentful towards the Rangers, considering their high survival rate. The Rangers were also an independent company and their limited combat experience, especially compared to the county’s other units, would have reflected poorly on their honor, an important southern value.

Entry from Heartsill's diary dated June 1, 1864. — Entry from Heartsill’s diary dated June 1, 1864.

Finally, the townspeople provided both emotional and material support to the Texan units. The townspeople must have wondered why the W.P. Lane Rangers accepted all of the town’s support but were not out on the frontlines. For the woman mentioned in this entry in particular, though, the root of her frustration was clearly the death of her relative. How must she have felt, seeing the Rangers still in Marshall––the Rangers who rarely saw combat, and who never, even at Arkansas Post, experienced casualty rates as high as most companies?

This document points to the internal conflicts that ate at the Confederacy from the local level up. Not only was Heartsill himself a deserter (at least briefly), but so also was this woman’s husband––if Heartsill is to be believed. Moreover, the financial burdens that companies placed upon towns put stress on loyalty to the southern cause.

Portrait of Heartsill included on the first page of diary. Via Library of Congress.

William Williston Heartsill’s papers are held at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Photographing the German Air War, 1939-1945

During World War II, thousands of German “Propaganda Company” (PK) photographers took at least three and a half million pictures of every front on which the Germans were fighting. Hundreds of these photographs were published in mass circulation illustrated magazines and newspapers and seen by millions of readers. These images helped in significant ways to shape the way that Germans and Europeans saw the war between 1939 and 1945 and also to affect the visual memory of World War II up to the present day.

Benno Wundshammer (1913-1987) was one of these PK photographers. During World War II he was attached to the German Luftwaffe. He took photographs on almost all of the fronts—Poland, France, the Balkans, Russia, North Africa, Italy—where the German army fought. After 1945, he acknowledged that his images had often been used in the service of Nazi propaganda but dcnied that this had anything to do with their innate qualities. Wundshammer depicted himself as a craftsman intent only upon taking “good” pictures of the air-war. Yet it was this same self-image as a skilled practitioner of his craft, relentlessly searching for the “best” pictures of the war, that made Wundshammer so valuable to the Nazi regime. His pride in his work prevented him from ever questioning the job he was being asked to do. Nor were any of the photographs that Wundshammer submitted for publication seriously at odds with the visual needs of the Nazi regime.

Benno Wundshammer’s photograph of the pilot sitting in the cockpit of a Messerschmidt ME 110, May,1940 (Scherl Bilderdienst 4515)

Wundshammer was well-placed to take photographs of one of the central components and key emblems of Hitler’s new devastating Blitzkrieg—German warplanes, especially the Stuka dive bomber. He quickly discovered, however, that considerable difficulties confronted any photographer who wanted to take “good” pictures of the most dangerous moments of combat in the air. The central dilemma confronting the photographer was that the most dramatic moments of combat in the air which would have produced the best pictures were also the most dangerous. During combat in the air, the photographer had to man his machine gun because every single weapon on board had to be fired at the enemy. Sheer luck, as well as the photographer’s ability and experience, would determine whether he would be able to take any photographs while also shooting at the enemy. Confronted with the formidable difficulties of taking “good” pictures from a fast-moving plane, Wundshammer came to the conclusion that photographs alone could not show what he had experienced during an air battle; he would also have to write about it afterwards. In 1941, Wundshammer published Flyers-Knights-Heroes.With the Shark Squadron in France and other Reports of Combat. The book was produced by Verlag G. Bertelsmann in Gütersloh, a firm that made a great deal of money under the Nazis publishing very popular “war books.”

Wundshammer’s experience reminds us that what we remember visually as war depends not only upon what we can see in war photographs but also upon what these photographs do not, cannot, or will not show us.

Magna Carta and Anglo-American Constitutionalism

By Brian Levack

Magna Carta has often been hailed as a statement of fundamental law, the basis of the English constitution, a defense of individual liberty, the establishment of the rule of law, and even the foundation of English democracy. Actually, it was none of these.

One of four known surviving 1215 exemplars of Magna Carta. This document is held at the British Library and is identified as British Library Cotton MS Augustus II.106.

It is true that the Great Charter, which was signed 800 years ago in June 1215 by 24 rebel barons and the Lord Mayor of London and witnessed by 12 bishops and 20 abbots, did succeed in obtaining King John’s recognition of a long list of liberties of the nobility, the towns, and the clergy. But it is important to understand that liberties — note the plural form — in medieval England were considered specific exemptions from royal control rather than the exercise of individual political, social and economic freedom, which nineteenth-century liberals sought to promote and protect. The preface to Magna Carta also proclaimed the freedom of the English Church, but that was the freedom of the clergy to conduct its own business, such as holding elections without royal interference. It did not establish the institutional independence of the Church from the state or change the traditional legal arrangement by which the clergy held their land in the king’s name.

King John on a stag hunt. King John of England, 1167-1216. Illuminated manuscript, De Rege Johanne, 1300-1400

Magna Carta also defended the common law rights of landowners, but those specific property rights should not be confused with the inalienable rights proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789. Nor did the limitations on royal power enumerated in this charter establish the rule of law. That constitutional principle was not fully realized in England until the seventeenth century at the earliest.

Finally, this document, which guaranteed specific legal rights of the landed class, had nothing to do with the introduction of democracy, which was not achieved in England until parliament granted the vote to all adult males in 1918 and to women in 1928.

Magna Carta and the subsequent parliamentary statutes confirming it were the product of negotiation and compromise between the nobility and the clergy on the one hand and the monarchy on the other. The first draft of the document, which is now lost, demanded more concessions from King John than the final version signed at Runnymede on June 15. Magna Carta was in fact a peace treaty, drafted by the archbishop of Canterbury, that attempted—unsuccessfully in the end—to resolve a growing conflict between a faction of the English nobility and a financially strapped king—a conflict that erupted in the First Baron’s War of 1215 after Magna Carta was signed and continued throughout the following three centuries. Although Magna Carta was confirmed by Parliament at least 32 times, it was also ignored for long periods, and it was not always treated with the reverence that it commands today in England and The United States. During the Tudor period, when royal power was significantly enhanced and the crown managed finally to suppress the independent power of the great magnates of the kingdom, Magna Carta was hardly ever mentioned. In the early sixteenth century there was even a temporary revival of the reputation of King John, the antagonist of the barons and the clergy at Runnymede, both for the king’s efforts to strengthen royal power and for his attack on the English Church, over which the Tudors acquired control at the time of the Reformation. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries almost all of the 63 clauses of Magna Carta were repealed, a striking testament to its irrelevance to modern constitutional law.

Romanticised image of King John signing the Magna Carta, 1864.

And yet Magna Carta, viewed as a constitutional icon and statement of individual liberty, has persisted to the present day. The document is still treated with a reverence similar to that of our own Constitution, and hundreds of people visit Runnymede every year, where a monument was constructed in 1957 by none other than the American Bar Foundation. In this 800^th anniversary year all four surviving copies of the charter are on display at the British Library.

The Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede erected by the American Bar Association in 1957.

So how did this quintessentially medieval document acquire its iconic status as the foundation of the English constitution and a statement of what we call fundamental law? The key figure in this documentary make-over was Sir Edward Coke, the greatest English jurist of the seventeenth century, and the occasion was the Parliament of 1628, more than 400 years after Magna Carta was signed.

An engraved portrait of Sir Edward Coke, 1669

At that time Coke and his allies in the House of Commons attempted to place limits on Charles I’s use of the royal prerogative (the power the king exercises by himself) by passing the Petition of Right, which declared that English subjects could not be denied certain rights at the common law. During the war with Spain in the first three years of Charles’s reign (1625-28), the king had forced some of his wealthier subjects to lend him money with no guarantee of repayment, imprisoned men without showing cause (for refusing to lend the money), quartered soldiers in English towns without compensating those who housed them, and declared martial law in the parts of England where the army was stationed. During the debate on the Petition of Right, Coke argued that the king could not violate these rights under any circumstances, even in a time of war, because the king was under the law rather than above or outside it. In order to buttress this claim, Coke and his fellow MPs, supported by a group of antiquarians who rummaged through the records of parliament stored in the House of Lords, constructed the myth of the ancient constitution, which they claimed had originated in the misty Anglo-Saxon past and took precedence over the subsequent growth of royal power. According to Coke, the clearest written expression of this mythical ancient constitution was Magna Carta, which he transformed from a remedy of the specific grievances of wealthy landowners into a guarantee of the property rights and personal liberty of all freeborn English subjects. Coke could not have been clearer in this anachronistic historical exposition. According to Magna Carta he said, ”every free subject of this realm hath a fundamental property in his goods and a fundamental liberty of his person.”

The frontispiece to the first volume of Coke’s Reports (1600)

Now, there is good reason to celebrate Coke’s achievement in this regard. His reinterpretation of Magna Carta made a significant contribution to the acceptance of such hallowed constitutional principles as the rule of law, due process, and the claim, first made by John Adams in 1779, that we are a government of laws, not of men. In the conflict leading up to the American Revolution, colonists invoked the authority of Magna Carta to support their concept of “liberty” and independence from Great Britain, casting George III in the role of a the tyrannical King John. But as we recognize Coke’s achievement in this regard, we should also recognize that this brilliant jurist was not a very good historian. Not only did he invent an ancient constitution that had never existed, but he practiced what we now call Whig history—taking a document or an event (in this case Magna Carta) out of its proper historical context and making it out to be more modern than in fact it really was.

All images via Wikipedia.

Latinas and Latinos: A Growing Presence in the Texas State Historical Association

By Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco

Historians, both veterans and newcomers, recently gathered at the 2015 Texas State Historical Association conference in Corpus Christi. UT Austin, past and present, was well represented. Veteran Tejano historians Roberto Villarreal, Andres Tijerina, and Emilio Zamora attended, all of whom were part of the 1973 UT Austin MA Program in History, the first significant cadre of Tejano graduate students, following Carlos Castaneda and Jovita Gonzalez from decades before.

Dr. Benjamin Johnson; Dr. Monica Munoz Martinez; Dr. John Moran Gonzales; Dr. Trinidad Gonzales; and Dr. Sonia Hernandez

Historical presentations

At breakfast, Villarreal spoke of obstacles various historians placed before him to prevent his success. Today, Dr. Tijerina and Dr. Zamora are co-editing the forthcoming Tejano Handbook of Texas. Dr. Arnoldo De Leon, previous advisor to the Tejano entries of the Handbook’s 1996 edition, was also present as was Jesus F. de la Teja (UT PhD, 1988) who talked about his past role as a Texas State Historian. Dr. Carlos Blanton celebrated the recent publication of his book on UT’s Dr. George I. Sanchez, and Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez celebrated the publication of her essay on Jovita Idar in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.

Most encouraging was that for the first time a significant number of Latinas employed in history departments in Texas and elsewhere presented or attended. Present was Dr. Maritza de la Trinidad (UT Pan American); Dr. Laura Munoz (Texas A & M Corpus Christi); Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez (UTSA); Dr. Monica Munoz Martinez (Brown University); Dr. Sonia Hernandez (Texas A & M College Station); Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco (ENMU Ruidoso); and Dr. Caroline Castillo Crimm (retired, Sam Houston State University, UT PhD, 1994). English professor, Dr. Patricia Portales and doctoral candidate, Cecilia Venerable (UTEP) also presented.

Dr. Patricia Portales; PhD candidate Cecilia Venerable; Attorney Sharyll Teneyuca; Dr. Laura Munoz; Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez; Dr. Maritza de la Trinidad; Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco; Dr. Sonia Hernandez; and Dr. Carmen Tafolla

Other Tejanas conducting historical research also attended. Writer Dr. Carmen Tafolla and lawyer Sharyll Teneyuca spoke about labor activist and intellectual Emma Tenayuca. Archaeologist Dr. Mary Jo Galindo spoke about her grandmother, Mexicanist activist of San Antonio and Lytle, Texas, Maria L. Hernandez.

Several sessions were outstanding, including Grassroots Tejano History in Austin, San Antonio, and Laredo; Border Violence, 1915-1919; Tejana leaders; Dr. Hector P. Garcia; and Corpus Christi archives.

Grassroots Public and Community History

Latinas involved in Public History — historical preservation, public programming, and archival collections — were there too. These included Dr. Nancy Vera (Corpus Christi); Graciela Sanchez (San Antonio); Gloria Espitia (Austin); and Margarita Araiza (Laredo). All are key to grassroots Latino historical preservation, public programming, research, and archival preservation in their respective cities.

Tejano Grassroots History: Margarita Azaia; Gloria Espitia; and Graciela Sanchez

The Hispanic Heritage Center of Texas, a grass-roots institution, organized a session on South Texas’ role in Tejano-Mexicano culture. Founded in 2008, it focuses on the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Efforts by Laredo, Austin, and San Antonio community activists to preserve and promote Tejano and Tejana history were addressed. Margarita Araiza of the Webb County Heritage Foundation noted that historical fallacies are still being promulgated: Texas Monthly reported that Stephen F. Austin was the father of Texas and that the US cattle ranching industry was born in the 19th century, facts negating Spanish and Mexican presence.

The Webb County Heritage Foundation in Laredo works to preserve historic architecture and maintains the Villa Antigua Border Heritage Museum and the Republic of the Rio Grande Museum. It also sponsors a young archivist program along with a Cine de la Epoca de Oro (Mexican Golden Age movies), tours, and has succeeded in getting Laredo local history into the common core at public schools. Its publications include a Laredo Legacies booklet, a Haunted Heritage book, and pamphlets on Leonor Magnon de Villegas and Jovita Idar. The foundation presented its ten minute professional video on Magnon de Villegas.

Gloria Espitia, previously of the Austin History Center, reported that ordinary folks do not consider their materials “historical.” She spoke about exhibits she coordinated: Diez y seis; an Elderly Oral History Project (assisted by Professor Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez of UT); Quinceneras; Mexican American Firsts Trailblazers; Austin Brown Berets; and Latina Musicians. She also spearheaded an oral history project with Martin Middle school to document the thirty year effort to create the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin.

Graciela Sanchez, of San Antonio’s Westside Preservation Alliance, spoke on efforts to save the La Gloria building and the KCOR Spanish-language radio station building, both unsuccessful efforts. The organization has published pamphlets about Mexican-descent women singers and has reproduced historic photos for outdoor public display.

Dr. Nancy Vera reported on her singular efforts to produce a Corpus Christi Mexican American virtual museum online. Interviews she conducted with local historical figures can be found there too.

Mexican Border Violence, 1910-1919

One of the most important sessions focused on a public history project by historians in collaboration with the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. In commemoration of the 1915-2015 anniversary of racial violence in South Texas by the Texas Rangers and others, a group of historians are working on a project to give attention to murders suffered by Mexican descent people. Dr. Monica Martinez informed the audience of their website “Refusing to Forget” which includes a map of Texas’ racial violence against Mexicans.

Dr. Trinidad Gonzales said his great grandfather was killed in the matanza. He discovered a report of his death in a 1929 edition of El Defensor, a Spanish language Edinburg newspaper published by Santiago Guzman.

The panel reported on attempts to obtain historical markers commemorating the conflict. County control has censored some Tejano markers. Edwards County denied a marker about Antonio Rodriguez’ lynching in Rocksprings in 1910. Likewise, the Presidio Historical Commission denied one about the Porvenir Massacre of 1918. County historical societies have had decision-making power and conservative European Americans would like to prevent historical discussion. In contrast, Cameron county approved the “Matanza, 1915” marker but changed it title to “Victims of an Undeclared War, 1915.” And markers approving Jovita Idar and the Primer Congresso of Laredo, the first major Mexicanist civil rights congress, were approved by Webb county.

They also informed the audience of the Texas Historical Commission’s Untold marker program which the state pays for and is not vetted by local county commissions

Twentieth Century Tejana Leaders

Another historical session focused on twentieth-century Tejana leaders. Carmen Tafolla and Sharyll Teneyuca reported on labor activist Emma Tenayuca. Intrigued by politics by age 15, she became active early. While her work with the pecan sheller strike of 1938 is well known, fewer know of her work as a teacher. She obtained her teaching certificate in 1952 and taught at Catholic schools and Harlendale in San Antonio. In 1974 she obtained a masters at Our Lady of the Lake but retired in 1982.

Mary Jo Galindo noted that her grandmother Maria L. Hernandez worked in conjunction with her husband all her life. In the mid-1920s she had a midwifery certificate and in 1936 helped form the Asociacion Protectora de Madres and the Clinica de la Beneficiencia Mexicana. In 1939 she was a goodwill ambassador to Mexico and, as a result, the Mexican government gave the clinic an x-ray machine. In the 70s she attended Raza Unida Mujeres events with her husband though men were not permitted.

Cynthia Orozco talked about Adela Sloss Vento, a LULAC ally (League of United Latin American Citizens) and one of the most significant Mexican American civil rights leaders and public intellectuals in the 20^th century. Based on Sloss Vento’s archives, Orozco and Dr. Arnoldo Carlos Vento are completing a book manuscript on her work from the 1920s through the 1980s. Sloss Vento wrote to US and Mexican presidents, Congressmen, and state legislators to seek racial desegregation and improved lives for immigrant workers.

Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco (UT BA, 1980) chairs the History, Humanities, and Social Sciences Department at Eastern New Mexico University, Ruidoso. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (University of Texas Press, 2009) and a TSHA Fellow.

All photos courtesy of the author.

Historical Perspectives on Isao Takahata’s Grave of Fireflies

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is an uncompromising critique of Japanese society in the waning months of World War II, and a major milestone in the development of one of the world’s foremost animation studios.

1988 was a year of firsts for the young Studio Ghibli. In that year the studio’s creative leader, Hayao Miyazaki, directed My Neighbor Totoro, his first film set in historical Japan rather than in a fantasy world. The studio did not expect Totoro to be a financial success, so it decided to package it with an adaptation of a wartime melodramatic novel titled Hotaru no Haka, or Grave of the Fireflies. Fireflies was the first Ghibli film neither written nor directed by Miyazaki. Instead it was helmed by longtime animator Isao Takahata, who would go on to direct several more adult-oriented anime for Ghibli.

The studio’s expectations proved correct in the short term, but when Totoro aired on television it found its audience and became Ghibli’s first breakout hit. It is known and loved internationally and its title character is now the studio’s iconic mascot. Fireflies, meanwhile, is something of an anomaly. Though well-known to anime fans and highly esteemed by critics, it is one of the only Ghibli titles for which Disney is not the overseas distributor. Its DVD and Blu-Ray releases are of dubious quality, and it has been subjected to two different English language dubs despite the fact that, as a movie for adults, watching it in a language other than Japanese is as ridiculous as watching a dubbed Kurosawa or Ozu film. Subtitles better preserve the original characterizations and meanings.

But the most substantial distinctions between Fireflies and the rest of the Ghibli canon are its pessimistic message and its morally-compromised characters. As brilliant as Miyazaki’s renowned fantasies, Takahata’s later stories, and other Ghibli directors’ works are (and they almost always are) typically characterized by good people working hard toward clear-cut and laudable objectives. Not so with Fireflies. Its protagonists, a boy named Seita and his young sister Setsuko, are almost true-to-life. They think irrationally, make bad decisions, and behave in ways movie good guys usually don’t.

This is particularly true of Seita. As the older sibling, he is responsible for the care of his sister when their mother dies in a firebombing raid that destroys their house and their father is killed in battle. At first he does well. He finds lodging for himself and Setsuko in the home of a woman who provides them with food in exchange for their mother’s clothes. This woman embodies the attitude that, in wartime, everyone must make sacrifices for the good of the nation. The best touches of visual detail in the movie are when she is seen scraping burnt leavings from the bottom of a cooking vessel, and when her young lodgers carefully eat every grain of rationed rice and each infinitesimally small crumb of candy in their possession.

Seita begins to go astray, both from his duties as a caregiver and from his social duties, when he quarrels with the woman and leaves the comparative comfort of her house. At about 14 he is old enough to work, to “contribute to the war effort” as the woman commands him to do, but he opts not to seek employment with a munitions factory or a work detail. He never articulates his reason, but it is not anti-war sentiment. Seita is as emotionally invested in the success of Japan’s imperial mission as are all of the adults he knows. Rather, he seems to be motivated by a vainglorious search for individual autonomy. Generally speaking, this is not a commendable impulse in Japanese culture, especially not during the war.

Seita takes Setsuko to an abandoned bomb shelter near a small lake outside of town. In his mind, and at first glance, this appears to be an idyllic retreat from the horrors of the war. They spend their first night there catching fireflies, delicate creatures that live a lifespan of mere days before winking out of existence. The symbolism is obvious, but it is also the occasion for the movie’s most beautiful and haunting images.

It is not long, though, before it becomes clear that Seita is unequipped to handle life in exile. Setsuko develops a rash that grows increasingly painful, and she begins to exhibit the disturbing physical symptoms of malnourishment. Though Seita has some money in a bank account, he turns to stealing food, a serious crime particularly during wartime. Perhaps unconsciously, in his orphanhood he has become stubbornly obsessed with living outside of society. The death of the four-year-old Setsuko is therefore inevitable, and Seita himself, we have learned at the beginning of the movie, will die homeless and starving shortly after Japan’s surrender.

The movie is a cautionary tale about young people who recklessly buck social mores, but Seita is not portrayed as solely responsible for his and Setsuko’s deaths. In fact, he hardly seems to realize what he is doing or what is happening to them. He is a child, well-intentioned but confused and psychologically shattered. The movie reserves its moral censure for the adult characters. Director Takahata, who also wrote the screenplay, shows adults to be willfully apathetic about the children’s desperate plight. The woman who takes them in (and takes their mother’s possessions as payment) also drives them out with harsh criticism and justifies it as an act of patriotism. A doctor diagnoses Setsuko with malnutrition, but refuses to give her medicine and sends her and Seita away with no food and no advice. The worker who discovers Seita’s body among other homeless dead in the movie’s prologue seems to be unmoved, poking the corpses and searching their possessions before casting them aside. Only a police officer shows Seita some kindness by declining to press charges for theft, but in Seita’s case it might have been a greater kindness to take him into custody. Takahata has said that Fireflies is not an anti-war film, as many of Miyazaki’s movies quite clearly are, but it is certainly a bleak portrayal of the material and social condition Japan was in at the end of its last great war.

Destroyed buildings in Kobe after a firebombing attack on the city during World War II

Fireflies is not my favorite Ghibli movie (several of Miyazaki’s fantasy pieces vie for that position with Yoshifumi Kondo’s 1995 rumination on creativity Whisper of the Heart). Nor is it my favorite movie by Takahata (that’s 1991’s Only Yesterday). Arguably, Hayao’s son Goro Miyazaki’s subtle treatment of Japan’s postwar economic boom make From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) a better historical movie than Fireflies. The source material for Fireflies is just a touch too melodramatic, and its world does not leap from the screen and grip the imagination the way other Ghibli movies do. Yet as a work of art and a piece of historical fiction set during an especially difficult era, it is undeniably a valuable achievement. Embracing Defeat, John Dower’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning nonfiction book about early postwar Japanese culture, would make an excellent pairing with Grave of the Fireflies. The movie also stands on its own, and as an early herald of Studio Ghibli’s emergence as a leader in sophisticated animated entertainment.

History Museums: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

It’s strange that of the two most famous war-related museums in Japan, the one in Hiroshima, within sight of the untouched-since-1945 “Atomic Bomb Dome” that provides a stark reminder of the city’s destruction, is the more palatable. The other is the Yūshūkan, attached to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, controversial because it puts the onus on the war on every party except Japan and neglects to mention the military’s atrocities in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, at Naka-ku Hiroshima Japan, design by Kenzo Tange in 1955. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Yūshūkan is well worth visiting in spite of its sins of omission, because it houses one of the only Zero fighter planes on public display. But the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is a must-visit despite its distance from Tokyo. Its displays are up-front about Japan’s share of responsibility for the war and about the factors that made Hiroshima a target (it was for decades home to a major army base), while condemning with visual horrors the disproportionate, indiscriminate atomic destruction of the city. The museum offers a walk through of Hiroshima’s history with a tight focus on the moments and days after 8:16 AM on August 6, 1945.

The walls of the ground floor are paneled with copies of every letter that each Hiroshima mayor has sent to every world leader whose country has tested a nuclear weapon. Most of the recent ones are addressed to President Barack Obama; although the U.S. has not tested a nuclear weapon in the old-fashioned way since 1992, it carries out “subcritical” tests to this day. Another wall display shows the number of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors who are still living, and where in the world they are. At the time of my last visit to the museum in December 2013 there were still survivors in every prefecture of Japan, but within a few decades they will be gone and this museum will be even more crucial in preserving their memory.

Letters of protest written by the Mayor of Hiroshima.

Honest Abe’s Archive: The New Archive (No. 21)

By Charley S. Binkow

Perhaps no figure in American history has been studied more than Abraham Lincoln. A man of profound importance, intellect, and ambiguity, Lincoln has been a source of fascination for scholars, students, and Americans for generations. There are innumerable documents centered on Lincoln and his legacy, which are now accessible to everyone via The Lincoln Archives Digital Project.

According to their website, the digitalization project, which started in 2002, is the first project to scan “the entire contents of a president’s administration.” That’s a lot of stuff—by project’s end, they will have approximately fourteen million images. But they do a wonderful job of organizing their growing collection. There is a search option to the archive for those who know what they’re looking for. For those who just want to browse, I would recommend starting with the website’s interactive timeline. This screen not only gives one a comprehensive history of Lincoln’s life, but it also supplements dates with a ticker-tape news display of global history. For example, you can learn that in 1811, two years after Lincoln’s birth, the Grimm brothers published their famous fairy tale collection.

Honest old Abe on the Stump, at the ratification Meeting of Presidential Nominations. Springfield 1860. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

From that page, one can head to the documents section to read Lincoln’s personal writings. I recommend reading the letters he sent to Mary Todd—one can really feel how much he misses her while he’s traveling.

The website also gives researchers the chance to explore Lincoln’s world. I would suggest looking at the maps section located on the left. One can explore city maps, battle maps, maps of foreign countries, and maps of territories.

Battle of Gettysburg, 3rd July 1863.

The newspaper section is a must. The website breaks the papers up by north and south and lets you peruse to one’s heart’s content. The editors of the site also give the reader a chance to explore the history of the newspapers/magazines and suggested future readings.

This is a fruitful and expansive archive. And it’s only getting bigger. I have already found useful information for my own research, and I’m sure any scholar can find something of use here for theirs. But to any American history enthusiast, this is a playground of documents, pictures, and downright interesting stuff.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Joseph Parrott highlighted the digitalized political posters collected by archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing

Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush
Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, by William Burrows (1998)

The Soviet Union appeared handily ahead in space. They launched the first successful satellite, put the first man and woman in space, performed the first space walk, and sent the first satellites out of earth’s gravitation and to the moon. And yet the United States still “won” the Space Race. How could that be? In This New Ocean, William E. Burrows grapples with this and other questions, illuminating widespread political manipulation in the process, and chronicling the first space age.

Cold War tension, exacerbated by the Soviet Union’s new nuclear capabilities, and the upcoming 1957-58 International Geophysical Year initiated the Space Race – the Cold War competition between the US and Soviet Union to achieve superiority in spaceflight. The US and Soviet governments were eager to fund military ventures for national security; both countries poured billions of dollars into space and rocket agencies. National security was the foundation of the world’s public space frontier, which Burrows dutifully records from the US acquisition of German personnel (notably former Nazi, Wernher von Braun) and V-2 rocket onwards.

Burrows contends it is a misconception to perceive Soviet dominance at the outset of the Space Race. The US never truly lagged behind the Soviet Union in space capabilities. Upon learning about the successful launch of Sputnik 1, President Eisenhower actually felt mild relief, contrary to the American public’s fear of inferiority at the time. As Sputnik 1 orbited over American soil, Eisenhower’s personal fear of infringing on restricted airspace by orbiting above another country dissipated. Despite employing Sergei Korolyov, lead rocket engineer and Wernher von Braun’s Soviet counterpart, funding and morale for the Soviet space program dwindled following notable accidents and poor planning. The leadership regularly used outdated technologies in an effort to save money. They also put Korolyov and his team in competition with another Soviet program planning a manned Moon landing. Many in the leadership questioned the goal itself – why spend increased capital putting humans in space who require life support systems when robots were cheaper and might obtain similar results?

The Chief Designer Sergei Korolev (left) and the Chief Theoretician Mstislav Keldysh (right). In the centre- Igor Kurchatov, 1956

Following the initial Soviet rocket achievements, notably Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 spaceflight, President Kennedy looked to quell the American public’s fear of inferiority by investing heavily in space. Noticing the monetary influx, politicking scientists secured government funding. Burrows scrutinizes projections justifying project funding given to the government, exposing their unrealistic claims. For example, although the space shuttle project was an enormous financial undertaking, scientists justified the seemingly high cost by emphasizing the shuttle’s reusability, overstating the number of executable missions, and downplaying turnaround time. The cost per mission looked good on paper, but the figures rested on misleading data. The shuttle program could never live up to such deceptive expectations.

Along with chronicling Soviet and American achievements ranging from Sputnik 1 to the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Burrows also covers both US and Soviet program failures. These include Project Vanguard (America’s little known unsuccessful first attempt to place a satellite in orbit), a fatal American ground test fire, fatal Russian spacecraft electrical malfunctions, and space shuttle Challenger’s O-ring catastrophe. Each failure dealt a blow to the two superpowers’ morale, inviting the public to question its nation’s technological prowess.

Saturn V carrying Apollo 11 rises past the launch tower camera

A new space age has now begun. Private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are slowly taking the helm in the universe’s largest frontier. New questions arise: should space exploration be financed by centralized governments? How does one justify financing space exploration? If we choose to return to the Moon, land on Mars, or explore any facet of space, our technology will be rooted in the work of von Braun, Korolyov, Robert Goddard, and the other early rocket pioneers. The story of humanity’s very first space age, exploring This New Ocean, is inspiring, gripping, and encouraging.

William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (Random House: 1998)

History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

By Jimena Perry

Entrance to the Hall of Nevermore.

The Hall of Never Again (El Salón del Nunca Más) is located in Granada, in the highlands of Antioquia, Colombia. Granada is small place which lost 70% of its population between 1998 and 2000, going from 18,000 inhabitants to 5500 due to violence. The region saw near constant fighting among guerilla, paramilitary groups and the National Army between 1988 and the early 2000s.

When these violent episodes ended and the survivors felt it was safe to go back to their town and surrounding lands, they decided to get together to repair the urban area and remember those who died. With this in mind, they created the United Victims Association of the Municipality of Granada (Asociación de víctimas unidas del municipio de Granada), or Asovida, in 2005. The mayoralty gave them a space adjacent to the cultural center and Asovida used it to found The Hall of Never Again in 2009.

The Hall functions as a museum because it has displays and record books, and the coordinators attend workshops related to museum work, but they do not want to be considered a museum. Instead The Hall of Never Again, for them, is a memory place, a space for reflection and life.

The main goal of the Hall of Never Again is to make the public aware of the violence this community experienced. The main display consists of a wall covered with 180 photographs of some of the 2000 or more people of Granada who died since the 1980s. In this Hall, the survivors remember crimes such as 128 disappearances, 83 victims of landmines, and the displacement of nearly three-quarters of the population.

The intention of the picture display is to strike the visitor, to make him or her feel that these were persons just like them; people whose life affected a community and who therefore deserve remembrance. On another wall, there are children´s paintings, products of the workshops the project encouraged. To the left of the picture display there are images of 15 mass graves found in Granada. In another room, the visitor finds a large photograph of a march that took place in December 9, 2000, three days after one of the guerilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC), disputing the territory with the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional or ELN), destroyed the town. And still today, when someone is murdered, his or her picture becomes part of the wall.

View of the wall with the pictures at the Hall of Nevermore.

One way the creators of this Hall have found to help the survivors cope with the brutal attacks they experienced is the use of bitácoras. These are notebooks where relatives and friends of the victims can express their sadness over their losses. The bitácoras are designed to make the grieving process easier. There are now approximately fifty bitácoras, in which one can find mothers talking to their children, husbands to their wives, brothers to sisters, children to their parents, wives to their spouses, and other family members remembering their departed loved ones.

These notebooks become both objects to be exhibited and historical sources for studying the violence endured by a particular person or family and how they survived. The bitácoras relate the history and character of the dead person, and why he or she was important. They also help the public and visitors of the Hall to learn about local history and to link the surivors to community reconstruction processes.

View of some bitácoras.

The Hall of Never Again is the response of a community commemorating its own history in the absence of State presence. Its funding does not come from the Colombian government and due to its scarce resources it only opens during the weekends. However, the Hall has received international agencies´ economic help and has won national peace prizes. The emergence of this Hall and the fact that their funding is not from the Colombian State demonstrates the unwillingness of the government to take care of all the victims of the armed conflict. It also shows a kind of indifference towards small towns and municipalities that do not represent a big contribution to the national economy. But as Gloria Quintero, one of the local leaders who made the Hall possible, said, the Hall represents “…the value of remembering. Our loved ones die when we forget them. We want children to learn that forgetting is not the way to mourn.”

All photographs taken in August 2014 by Jimena Perry.

This essay is based on interviews by the author and draws on the following printed sources:

“Sepultadas 21 personas de la masacre en Granada, Antioquia.” (Medellín: Caracol, 2000). Accesed April 9, 2014, http://www.caracol.com.co/noticias/judiciales/sepultadas-21-personas-de-la-masacre-en-granada-antioquia/20001105/nota/75878.aspx.

Alonso López, N. (2010) “Granada, Antioquia, el pueblo que dijo ´Nunca más´ a la violencia. El Tiempo. Bogotá

« Previous Page

Recent Posts